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Fedora Cron Job Files

This document describes the guidelines for packaging cron job files in Fedora.

For the purposes of these guidelines, a cron job file is defined as a script (e.g., a shell script or a Perl script). These cron job files are scheduled to run on regular intervals by a cron daemon.

Cron Job Files on the filesystem

Packages with cron job files must place those cron job files into one or more of the following directories /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, /etc/cron.monthly depending on the intended interval they should run.

There is an exception to this rule:
If a certain cron job has to be executed at some frequency or at a specific time interval other than the above, then a custom crontab file should be added to /etc/cron.d (with 0640 permissions). In this case, the cron job file (the script) must be placed in an appropriate system location (e.g. %{_sbindir}, %{_libexecdir}), and NOT in /etc/cron.d.

All cron job files installed in any of these directories must be scripts and must be treated as configuration files so that they can easily be modified by the local system administrator.